I know this is more than likely going to get lost in the crowd, and is very long, but here it goes:

In the 7th grade I got sick with a stomach virus at school, so I called my grandma to come get me. She lived close to the school, and she never minded. But this time, she said she couldn't come because she had a cold. I had this odd feeling (aside from the virus) I was really worried about her for some reason, like panicked, but all she had was a cold right? No, she sounded too weird.

I called my mom to come pick me up instead, but told her to call her mom (grandma) first. My mother told me when she picked me up that my grandma was refusing to go to a doctor. I told my mom right then and there, "There's something wrong with her. She has to go soon. Make her go." She made her go a week later, I rode along, and they ordered chest x-rays. About a month after that, she was diagnosed with lung cancer. I don't remember the stage, but they had to do chemo, and remove a good bit of her left lung.

She beat it, but it took it's tole. For 2 years she was put on a breathing machine/heavy medications. She hated it, she was a fancy lady, her words were, "Ugg, i'm too fly for this thing Alice." I was named after her. A week after saying this to me, she gave my mother a dove pendant and told her to keep it always. But this didn't sit well, I just felt...wrong again about her, but didn't know why. I couldn't quit thinking, so I had my best friend come over to distract me. In the morning we woke up to a phone call from my uncle, my grandma had died with the phone in her hand, she was calling me.

A couple of months pass and my uncle who called to tell us the bad news comes over for a visit. (This is all very hard, i'm not over all this, but it really is the truth.) He was coughing, doing an inhaler because he thought something was wrong with his lungs, and promptly coughing up blood. I once again tell mom, "He has to go to the doctor, that sounds like cancer. Blood = bad." He absolutely refuses to go. A month before the anniversary of my grandmothers death, he passes out in the floor of his house, and his 9 year old son calls an ambulance. He wakes up and tries his hardest not to go to the hospital because he just wants to 'die in the same home as his mother', but they get him there when he passes out again.

Lung cancer - spreading. They had to put him into an induced coma. I was not going to say this part out loud, except to maybe my friend, but i "He isn't going to make it long." I find this the most difficult part. He couldn't breath on his own anymore, and they had to put him on a breathing ventilator, but they woke him up to let him know what was going on, and told him his state. By now his cancer was terminal, so they just wanted to know when he was going to get moved or unplugged. He was given the choice. Had to write his responses because of the breathing pump/throat damage, and he wrote, "Can't live like this, unplug me, love you all."

He made it in the hospital past the anniversary of my grandmothers, his mothers death...by 2 days. This tore my mother up. She lost her father just a few years before her mother, and then she lost her twin brother. 5 years later my mother still cries about it almost everyday. You know those people that don't mourn properly? Yea, that's her...well seeing her this way and not being able to do anything to help her....it hurts. We don't know if the lung cancers were related because of some unknown cause, but they were both smokers.

I wish I could say that those were the last times I 'called it', but it's not. Those were just the ones that impacted me the most. I wish I could have done something. It's silly, irrational that I could have known these things were going to happen, and all it boils down to is being perceptive about people and sicknesses. I don't believe in any deity, so in a way, it makes it worse. But if you've got a feeling, you better trust it.